


it nourished him with thirst, the desert

by outboxed (fallencrest)



Category: Justified
Genre: Army, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-04 01:31:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1761863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallencrest/pseuds/outboxed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He thought the army might suit him: discipline and an excuse to blow shit up. But the army doesn't suit him. Not at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it nourished him with thirst, the desert

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://nvrleaveharlan.livejournal.com/12791.html?thread=147959#t147959) for Summer in Harlan II.

He thought the army might suit him: discipline and an excuse to blow shit up. But the army doesn't suit him. Not at all.

His daddy might have told him, if he'd asked, that Boyd never was any good at following orders, not even simple instructions. 

He spends more of bootcamp doing press-ups and laps for insubordination than actually doing regular drills. He doesn't mind that so much though because, at bootcamp, he's a god. He becomes a legend. 

One night after a particularly harsh punishment, he comes back to the barracks preaching about the evils of command and he's their messiah for an evening, until they attempt to put his teachings into practice the next day and end up chickening out when the drill sergeant threatens to make them all spend the week surviving in the wilderness a few miles out from camp, without any rations. 

That night, some high-up decides they should blindfold Boyd and give him a beating, since someone's obviously whispered in the ear of authority that he was behind the rebellion (not that it wasn't obvious). 

He goes back to his dorm bruised and bleeding and he smiles through the blood in his mouth, says "this is what your country would do to you all, simply for believing you are a sovereign being." And some of the recruits are still listening, even if most of them are too afraid to follow him. 

Soon he has one of the camp's lieutenants behind him, secretly passing him liquor and extra rations. He knows by then that the army isn't the place for him but he discovers he can make a place for himself there. He makes a place for himself and it works, right up to the moment he climbs out of the chopper and into the desert barracks.

There is no place for him in the desert. The desert is dry and cruel and it cracks his skin and burns his throat with thirst and most of it is just silently waiting. 

He forms a lot of plans in the desert, when he's not too busy being too terrified to think of anything else. He forms a lot of plans for getting out of there, plans he never makes good on. 

In the desert, he watches men die. Not that he hadn't seen a man die before but it had been clean, easy, weirdly sanitized to see a guy take a bullet to the chest. This was festering wounds and no medical care for miles around and no spare water to wash it clean. This was not knowing if that chopper flying overhead was friendly and not knowing if it was safe to stand up and flag it down, even if you knew it was. 

In the desert, he blows up a house believed to harbour a terrorist but the only bodies they find inside are a mother and her children; and he feels emptier than he ever has for reasons that have nothing to do with their meagre provisions.

In the desert, he stops being afraid of just about everything, except dying slow and painful. He isn't afraid of dying, doesn't think he ever really was; but he's more afraid than he ever thought he would be of bleeding out slow or wasting from thirst. He dreams about it and the dreams seem to last forever. He's at the bottom of a well and it's dry and he tries to yell but his voice is feeble, dry and cracked, until he can't yell anymore but he keeps trying because or else he'll die. Some nights, he wakes thinking the well's collapsing in on him but then it's only the tent collapsed in a sandstorm, sand burying him. Some nights he falls back asleep and dreams of being buried alive, like in that mineshaft, choking on something that might be sand or might be coal-dust.

He kills men and he watches men die. He reads a dead man's bible and a living man's Maxim magazine. He tells stories about Harlan and they call him 'the Hillbilly'. He hears stories about growing up poor in the Bronx or how this kid (younger than him even) just wanted to go to college, never wanted this. He feels like a dead man, trading stories with dead men. By the end of the tour, half of them are dead men but he isn't, not him, though he feels it.

The only time he feels alive in the desert is when he's setting a charge, backing up, yelling "fire in the hole". It's the only time he can laugh because it makes him feel powerful and alive and like a god again. He's an ant on god's boot, he's nothing, just another beetle frying under a magnifying glass until he's causing schisms greater than himself. Then he can be more than a man, more than the son of a man who runs crime down in a tiny east Kentucky holler, more than the sum of his names or his skills. But then he blows up a house containing only innocents and he spends a month pondering on the misuse of power before he's formed the perfect vitriol, the perfect response: the army, the nation, they are the monsters, the machine, we are all minuscule particles in a mighty machine and we have to break the machine, have to turn against it, its agenda, the power is in the individual, the individual is sovereign. 

By the time the helicopter lands at the battered camp, stirring whirlwinds of sand, he is humming with his new purpose. He is not an ant in a desert, not a soldier in a regiment, a cog in a machine. He is not his father's son. He is his own machine. He can do whatever he wants, create an order all of his own. He can kill a man, has killed men. He can be an agent of change, sovereign of his own world. 

He takes off the uniform and he becomes himself. He signs the severance papers and there is no man above him, only the sky. He survived the desert, the mines, and he returns to Harlan county more than the sum of his parts. The desert nourished him with thirst instead of water, fed him cruelty and clarity; and gave him back to the place he grew up as a new man, able to see it for what it was and love it for the thing it was, able to smile when Bo Crowder says, "Welcome home, son."


End file.
